An
enhanced CD recording of Dialtones is now available.
This CD-Extra contains a complete live recording of the 26-minute
concert, as well as a special CD-ROM component with Quicktime
video excerpts, interviews with the artists, and other information
about the performances.

Dialtones
is a large-scale concert performance whose sounds are wholly produced
through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience's
own mobile phones. Because the exact location and tone of each participant's
mobile phone can be known in advance, Dialtones affords a
diverse range of unprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting
structures. Moreover, by directing our attention to the unexplored
musical potential of a ubiquitous modern appliance, Dialtones
inverts our understandings of private sound, public space, electromagnetic
etiquette, and the fabric of the communications network which connects
us.

Dialtones was presented in two consecutive concerts in September,
2001, as a co-production of Golan Levin and the Ars Electronica Festival,
and in seventeen performances in May/June 2002 at the Swiss National
Exposition. Dialtones begins with a brief preparation phase prior to its
performance, during which the members of the audience register their
wireless telephone numbers at a cluster of secure Web kiosks. In exchange
for this information, the participants receive seating assignment
tickets for the concert venue, and new "ringtones" are then automatically
downloaded to their handsets. During the concert itself, the audience's
mobile phones are brought to life by a small group of musicians, who
perform the phones en masse by dialing them up with a specially
designed, visual-musical software instrument.
Because the audience's positions and sounds are known to the Dialtones
computer system, the performers can create spatially-distributed melodies
and chords, as well as novel textural phenomena like waves of polyphony
which cascade across the crowd; these musical structures, moreover,
are visualized by a large projection system connected to the performers'
interfaces. Towards the end of its half-hour composition, Dialtones
builds to a remarkable crescendo in which nearly two hundred mobile
phones peal simultaneously. It is hoped that the experience of Dialtones
can permanently alter the way in which its participants think about
the cellular space we inhabit.

ARTISTS'
STATEMENT
Wireless telephony has quickly become an indispensable aspect of modern
life. Today, one out of ten people on the planet possesses a mobile
phone; over the next three years, according to the industrial analysis
firm The Gartner Group, this market is expected to increase by almost
a billion new users [1].
Ironically, the astonishing eagerness with which we have adopted mobile
phones is matched by our almost equal repulsion on the occasion of
a cell phone's ringing. Mobile phones now infuse our theaters and
public spaces with the least welcome details of our neighbors' intimacies,
and perforate our private lives with the sonic machinery of electronic
commerce. Our emotional reactions to these interjections can even
outstrip the veneer of our professional identities: when ringing mobile
phones interrupted keynote speakers at a recent telecommunications
conference in Finland, the conference manager became enraged and threatened
to get a radio-frequency scrambler to silence the din [2].
Caught between adoration and irritation, we have come to regard our
intimate communications apparel with a deep ambivalence.

In the hype, hate and hypnosis surrounding the mobile phone, its potential
as an ingredient of art has been largely overlooked. As with the proverbial
fish who would never discover water, we take for granted that we are
immersed in cellular space, our imaginations dulled by the extraordinary
ubiquity of our wireless devices. Announcers at every modern-day concert
command us to turn off our cell phones, but what Cagean aesthetic
possibilities might we discover in leaving them on? What deranged
beauty might we find, or what might we learn about our interconnected
selves, in their high, pure tones? The mobile phone's speakers and
ringers make it a performance instrument. The buttons make it a keyboard
and remote control. Its programmable rings make it a portable synthesizer.
Yet, although no sacred space has remained unsullied by the interruptions
of mobile phone ringtones, there is no sacred space, either, which
has been specifically devoted to their free expression. In the context
of this lack, and in the context of our society's contradictory attitudes
towards wireless communication technologies, Dialtones is proposed.

If our global communications network can be thought of as a single
communal organism, then the goal of Dialtones is to indelibly
transform the way we hear and understand the twittering of this monumental,
multicellular being. One of Dialtones's strategies for doing
so is the musical reification of this organism's sprawling and enveloping
omnipresence. By placing every participant at the center of a massive
cluster of distributed speakers, Dialtones makes the ether
of cellular space viscerally perceptible. In a rejoinder to the eminent
electronic composer Iannis Xennakis— who once complained that all
electronic music sounded alike, because it would inevitably emanate
from the same pair of speakers —Dialtones's radical surround-sound
is at once musically and phenomenologically unique.

In an appropriate acoustic environment, the sporadic triggering of
calls to mobile phones can evoke the placid chirps and trills of crickets,
cicadas, frogs and birds. If hundreds or even thousands of mobile
phones were to ring simultaneously, by contrast, the result would
be an unimaginably seething, engulfing cacophony. Between these two
textural extremes lies an enormous terrain of more musically familiar
possibilities: gently shifting diatonic chord progressions, distributed
and aggregate melodies, roving clouds of spatialized sound-clusters,
and pointillistic hyper-polyphonies. Over the course of its half-hour
duration, Dialtones explores sequences and combinations of
each of these possibilities, scaffolded throughout by a set of recurring
harmonic themes and slowly-evolving melodic phrases. Ultimately, the
exact composition of Dialtones is a function of both the scored
performance produced by the project's staff, and the specific settings
of the phones brought by the concert's attendees.

In Dialtones, the phones, and not their owners, speak to one
another. By summoning a communication between communications technologies
in which there is no interlocutor, Dialtones invites its participants
to perceive an order in what is otherwise disorganized public noise,
and ratify it as a chorus of organized social sound. Thus the overdetermination
of the world of Work is countered with an equally determined Play,
as the ringing of mobile phones—ordinarily, the noise of business,
of untimely interruptions, of humans enslaved to technology—is transformed
into a sound of deliberate expression, startling whimsy, and unconventional
beauty.

TECHNICAL
REALIZATIONDialtones'technical realization
is broadly divided into three distinct software subsystems: (A) the
means by which the audience's mobile phones were registered (prior
to the performance) into a networked database; (B) the means by which
the audience's cell phones were computationally dialed (and thereby
performed) during the concert itself; and (C) the telephony middleware
which communicated the dialing requests from the performance system
to the infrastructure of the local Mobile Switching Center. In addition,
two special optical subsystems added visual and diagrammatic dimensions
to the performance: (D) a vertical video projection system, in which
spots of light were cast from above onto actively ringing audience
members; and (E) an assembly of autonomous miniature lights which
visually augmented the audience's highly-localized cellular activities.
In this section, each of these mechanisms is treated in turn.

A. Prior to the Dialtones concert, audience participants register
their mobile phone numbers (and model numbers) at special Web-based
terminals placed outside and around the performance venue. ASP-based
CGI scripts are used to store this information in a SQL database.
At the same time, the scripts also use a ticketing algorithm to issue
the audience member an assigned seat in the concert auditorium. Depending
on the make and model of the participant's phone, it can be possible
to programmatically modify its ringtone at this time; if so, a specially-composed
ringtone is encoded in the RTTTL (ringtone text transmission language)
data format and transmitted to the user's phone as an SMS message.
The Dialtones staff composed more than 100 customized ringtones
for the concert, wrote special software to convert these ringtones
from MIDI sequences into RTTTL, and created a special CGI system to
transmit these tones automatically to the audience's phones. In the
Linz performances, a small number of preconfigured phones were also
available as temporary loans for phoneless participants.

B. After the participants' phone numbers and models have been collected
and stored in a database, Dialtones itself is performed live
on a custom software instrument which makes use of this database.
This performance system consists of an interactive
graphical software interface, which represents each mobile phone
in the audience as a spatialized cell in a visual grid. During the
performance, the performers place "animated paint" into specific cells
in the visual grid; these actions trigger the ringing of the corresponding
mobile phones in the audience. It is important to emphasise that all
of the phone dialings are executed "by hand"; that is, they
are set into motion by the direct action of a human performer. The
performance instrument is implemented as an OpenGL-based Windows application.

C. The Windows-based performance software transmits dialing requests
over a TCP/IP LAN to a nearby Linux-based telephony server. This machine
uses an Aculab telephony card
to convert these requests into actual phone calls. The Aculab card
transmits the phone calls over two dedicated E1 lines (primary-rate
2Mbit ISDN connections), directly into the Mobile Switching Center
(MSC) of the local mobile service provider (in Linz, A1 Mobilkom Austria;
at the Swiss National Exposition, Swisscom Mobile). The local Base
Transceiver Station (BTS, or cell antenna) in the location of the
concert venue was specially modified by the provider in order to allow
at least 60 simultaneous signalling channels.

D. The audience-orchestras at the two Linz performances each consisted
of 200 participants, who were arranged in a 20x10 seating grid. The
performers' grid-based graphical interface is projected onto the audience
from above, and carefully registered with their seats. As a result,
each participant is lit up by a personal spot of light whenever their
handset is rung. The concerts performed in Linz used a 12000 ANSI
Lumen Barco ELM R12, with a special wide-angle lens, for the projection
of these spotlights.

In order to more clearly show how the spots of light play across the
audience— indicating which people are ringing at any instant— a very
large, multi-panel Mylar mirror (6x12 meters) is erected at an
angle above the crowd.

Of the 200 participants in Linz—whose phones hailed from 13 different
countries—as many as sixty could be dialed at any one instant. Each
performance lasted approximately 28-30 minutes, and entailed the placement
of more than 5000 phone calls. The seventeen concerts presented at
the Swiss National Exposition used orchestras of 99 participants [9x11],
of whom any 60 could be dialed simultaneously.

E. The last visual subsystem consisted of a set of two hundred small
keychain lights, which were distributed to the audience-participants
at the time of their pre-concert registration. These inexpensive and
autonomous devices, which are sensitive to energy in the 800-1900
mHz radio band, illuminate a small red LED when they are within one
meter of a ringing mobile phone. Despite their small size, the darkness
of the concert hall made it possible to observe the flashing of these
lights, which were also reflected in the large suspended mirror.

Generally speaking, these keychain lights would flash about two seconds
prior to the ringing of a nearby mobile phone, while the overhead
video projection system would typically enable its corresponding spotlight
within half a second after the phone had begun to ring. These minute
differences in timing had
the effect of diffusing events over time, creating micro-anticipations
and multilayered syncopations between the light and sound of the performance.

The combined effect of the telephone rings with their synchronized
visual phenomena was to render each participant as an audio-visual
pixel, a twinkling particle in an audio-visual substance—and the visitors,
as a group, could at once be audience, orchestra and (active) score.

The
Dialtones composition
consists of three major subsections, or "movements", each
approximately ten minutes long. The first section is produced entirely
through the ringing of the mobile phones of the 200-person audience;
these phones were completely unamplified by any means. The second
section, a "solo" movement, is performed by Dialtones
staff member Scott Gibbons on ten amplified (but otherwise unmodified)
mobile phones. In the third section,
the soloist plays together with the ensemble.

The goal of Dialtones' three-part structure is to introduce
the contrasting aesthetic possibilities of virtuosic real-time cellphone
performance ("mobile phone jockeying") on the one hand,
with coordinated-ensemble handheld-music on the other. In addition
to yielding a variety of sonic contrasts, this structure also allows
for the exploration of a broad range of musical interaction-models:
from the deeply practiced (e.g. Gibbons' solo performance), to the
entirely visual (e.g. the graphical
interface controls used by Levin and Shakar to interactively perform
the audience phones), to a lightweight model of consumer participation
(e.g. through one's selection/purchase of a phone model, negotiation
of its ringtone, and manner of displaying
it during the performance).

Within each of the three movements, the composition is structured
as a sequence of sound-textures. These texture-segments are realized
as interestingly distinct combinations of ringtones; while the sound
of one texture resembles a forest full of twittering birds, another
consists of pure drones, and recalls the sound of a pipe organ. There
are about fifteen sound-textures in all, each approximately two minutes
long. Although the order and duration of these sound-textures is explicitly
scored, the moment-to-moment details within each texture are left
to the improvisation of the Dialtones performers.

The final movement of the Dialtones concert concludes with
a climactic crescendo involving both orchestra and soloist. During
the course of this section, the Dialtones soloist Scott Gibbons
initiates the "ringing" of a phone's vibrator, transduced
by a flat piezoelectric microphone and amplified by a subwoofer. At
the same time, increasingly greater numbers of phones are introduced
until the maximum possible number of simultaneous rings (60) is achieved.
At this point, louder phones are swapped with quieter ones, and the
selection of rings shifted around the orchestra until, within the
space of a few seconds, all 200 of the audience phones have been triggered.

SPONSORS

Dialtones:
A Telesymphony
was a co-production of Golan Levin and the 2001 Ars Electronica Festival,
and was realized and made possible through the extensive technical
collaboration of jet2web
Mobilkom Austria.

CONTRIBUTOR
BIOGRAPHIESGolan Levin
[golan at flong dot com, b.1972] is an artist and composer interested
in developing artifacts and experiences which explore supple new
modes of audiovisual expression. His work has focused on the design
of systems for the creation and performance of simultaneous image
and sound, as part of a more general examination of communications
protocols for individual engagement and social dialogue. Levin is
the recipient of an Award of Distinction in the Prix Ars Electronica
2000 for his Audiovisual
Environment Suite (AVES) interactive software and its accompanying
audiovisual performance, Scribble.
Levin received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the MIT Media
Laboratory, where he studied with John Maeda in the Aesthetics
and Computation Group. Prior to this, he worked as a research
scientist and interaction designer at Interval Research Corporation
for four years. He currently resides in New York City.

Scott Gibbons began
composing electronic music in 1984. Under the stage name of Lilith
he began a two-fold exploration into the possibilities of natural
acoustic sound on the one hand, and those of information technology
on the other. Many of his compositions defy normal frequencies and
come close to silence. His most recent CD, Imagined Compositions
for Water, has just been released on the HushHush label; other
CDs include Stone in 1992, Orgazio and Redwing
in 1994 and Field Notes in 1998. Scott records on the Sub
Rosa and Hushhush labels and is currently developing a new music
opera with Socìetas Raffaello
Sanzio in Italy.

Gregory Shakar is
exploring various paths toward the goal of creating emotive and
expressive active art. In the course of this effort he taps his
experience as an artist, musician, and composer with the intention
of teasing out the fundamentals of human attention and fascination.
While participating with his recent reactive sound sculptures, viewers
have controlled thunderous 30-meter long wires, expressive 3-meter
tall metronomes, dozens of dangling tentacles, sociable spiny metal
spheres and musical bolts of lightning. Shakar is currently a Research
Fellow at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York
University.

Yasmin Sohrawardy is a software engineer specializing in
the telephony and financial sectors, and was the lead telephony
software engineer for the Dialtones project.

Joris Gruber is a software
engineer specializing in databases. Gruber developed the system
which performed automatic ticketing, programme generation, and seating
assignments for the Dialtones project.

Jörg
Lehner was the technical director for Takeover, the 2001
Ars Electronica Festival, and coordinated the lighting, networking,
recording and staging needs for Dialtones.

Gunther Schmidl
is a software engineer specializing in databases and web-based programming.
Schmidl developed the automatic SMS transmission component of the
Dialtones user registration system.

Erich Semlak
is a software engineer specializing in databases, and directs the
database technology support for the Ars Electronica Festival. Semlak
developed the phone registration database for Dialtones.

Jonathan Feinberg
is a drummer and software engineer based in Boston. His particular
expertise is UNIX programming, databases, server-side programming
and scripting, which he has applied to the creation of a number
of projects in both the commercial and art domains.

RELATED
PRESS

The Dialtones project has been awarded an Honorable Mention
in Interactive Art from the 2002 Prix Ars Electronica competition.

An
enhanced CD recording of the Dialtones concert is now available
on theStaalplaatlabel
(STCD 160).

tele0820.mp3[900k]. Approximately twenty of the audience's
mobile phones produce a twinkly, sparkly texture. Recorded 8 minutes,
20 seconds into the concert.

tele1530.mp3[2.5Mb]. A portion of Scott Gibbons' solo
(performed live on 6 amplified but unmodified phones), as he is
rejoined by drones from the mobile orchestra.

tele2000.mp3[1.0Mb]. About ten audience phones play a
pattern of ostinatos by Greg Shakar.

tele2330.mp3[1.5Mb]. Scott dials a phone in order to trigger
its (amplified) vibrator, while 60 audience phones swell to a crescendo.

PHOTOGRAPHSAustria 2001
[115kb
/ 1.1Mb].
The audience sees their own reflection in a 12-meter-wide mirror;
white spotlights in the reflected image indicate the audience members
whose phones are actively ringing. Projection screens at the sides
of the stage display the graphical computer interface used by the
performers to trigger the audience's phones; this projection is
also the same image which is cast onto the audience itself.

Austria
2001
[117kb
/ 2.3Mb].
The ringing audience is bathed in yellow light while Scott Gibbons
performs a vibrating phone, magnified by a live video feed in the
side projection screens.

Austria 2001
[65kb/2.2Mb].
A photograph taken from backstage clearly shows the performers'
graphical interface. Bright white spots indicate actively ringing
audience phones; dim yellow spots indicate the subset of phones
selected by the performers to be available at that moment.

Austria
2001.
Photographs taken from backstage,
and from the performance rehearsals. The large mirror can be seen
in the upper right photo.

Switzerland
2002. The
seventeen performances in Murten and Biel were presented in smaller
venues, with orchestra-audiences of 99 persons. Plasma displays were
used instead of the vertical projection system. Performers: Scott
Gibbons (phone soloist, in blue light) and Golan Levin (conductor,
in red light).

VIDEO

Video
of Dialtones is available at YouTube here
and here.
This recording, made on September 2nd 2001, documents the first
of the two Linz performances.